Category: Sun City Real Estate (page 7 of 9)

by Greg Swann

Sun City Real Estate Broker

Author website

This is my column for this week from the Arizona Republic (permanent link).

 
Doing the right kinds of repairs and remodeling to your home is the key to maintaining its resale value

Cleaning, painting and doing small repairs around the house are just about unlimited virtues for homeowners.

They’re a matter of necessity for people who hope to sell their homes. Only the best-prepared homes are selling at premium prices right now, with the rest going at or near the lender-owned price.

But even if you’re not selling, staying on top of the little things promotes your enjoyment of the home, and it helps to sustain its resale value. At a minimum, regular maintenance will help you catch small problems before the become big, expensive problems.

But if doing little jobs matters a lot, what about doing big jobs? Should you redo the kitchen and bathrooms while the market is low? Should you convert the carport into a garage and the patio into a family room? Should you add on a brand new master suite?

The definitive answer to all these questions is: Maybe.

Remember that the Phoenix real estate market may be down for years to come. It’s possible you won’t see a return on your investment for quite a while.

On the other hand, if you know you’re going to be in the home for the next five years, and if a new kitchen will substantially improve your enjoyment of the home, it might be worth doing.

Labor can be very cheap right now, and money is easy to obtain if you have equity in your home. But you have to resist the urge to over-improve for your neighborhood. Brazilian Blue Marble is gorgeous, but it probably won’t be worth more than Corian or Formica countertops on resale.

Serious additions are a bigger question. If you know you’re going to be in the home for five years, you’re probably okay. If the addition makes sense — if you live in a neighborhood of two bedroom homes, adding a master suite makes great sense — then go ahead.

Build with permits and follow the building codes, though. The worst thing you can do is spend money and time on supposed improvements that actually reduce the resale value of the home.

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by Greg Swann

Sun City Real Estate Broker

Author website

This is my column for this week from the Arizona Republic (permanent link).

 
If selling is not a viable option, you need to fall in love with your house all over again

The foreclosure market dominates the news, but it remains that good old-fashioned American homeowners occupy the overwhelming majority of Phoenix-area homes. That’s the good news.

And here’s some even better news: If you have significant equity in your home, you can probably refinance right now, reducing your monthly payment.

But here’s the bad news: Unless you absolutely have to, you probably won’t be moving for at least five years.

Don’t believe the number you see on that refi appraisal. At most, your house is worth the same amount as a comparable lender-owned home, plus the net cost to bring that home up to the livability of yours.

Swallow hard. You may have read in the paper that Americans lost $2 trillion in real estate equity in 2008. That’s a specious number. Money is the stuff you can fold up and spend. The equity in your home is unrealized money. You weren’t rich when your home was worth a lot, and you’re not poor now that it isn’t.

But what you are is stuck, practically speaking.

You don’t want to sell your house for what it can bring right now. If you do, you will lose money. But, refi or not, you’re making your payments.

If your home really was purely an investment, like a stock, it might be wise to dump it, take your lumps and move on.

But your home is not only where your heart is, it is very probably where most if not all of your savings are. You need to wait for the market to turn so you can sell at a profit.

So what should you do?

My advice: Paint.

Patch that stucco and paint it. Caulk the wood at the eaves and the trim and paint it. Clean out the house one room at a time and patch and paint the walls, repairing and painting the molding.

You’re stuck in your house for the next five years. It’s time to fall in love with it all over again. When there’s nothing you can do to improve the real estate market — paint.

Technorati Tags: arizona, arizona real estate, phoenix, phoenix real estate, real estate, real estate marketing

by Greg Swann

Sun City Real Estate Broker

Author website

This is my column for this week from the Arizona Republic (permanent link).

 
“U.S adults” may not want foreclosed homes, but homebuyers sure do

Did you see in the news where only 47% of U.S. adults would consider buying a foreclosed home?

An amazing number, isn’t it? What does it mean?

Almost nothing, of course. The real estate market in Phoenix, along with many, many other cities, is dominated by foreclosed homes right now. They are virtually all that is selling.

So how could so many homes be selling if so many people are averse to buying them?

This is a nice lesson in the uselessness of public opinion polls. “U.S. adults” are not homebuyers. Homebuyers are homebuyers. Asking U.S. adults how they feel about sushi or blackberry wine will tell you nothing about their sales, either.

What the survey does tell us is that the news has gotten out about the sometimes difficult process of buying a foreclosed home — especially a short sale — and about the often dismal condition of those homes.

And yet, foreclosed homes are selling and virtually nothing else is.

Why?

Because they’re cheap, that’s why. Even in the nicest neighborhoods, a lender-owned home will sell at a discount of 50% to 80%, compared to owner-occupied homes. In not-as-nice communities in the West Valley, you can pick up a stucco-and-tile 3 bedroom, 2 bath, 1,500 square foot home with a two-car garage for $50,000.

As I write this, there are 120 homes like that, all built 1995 and later, listed for $75,000 or less.

Let the price rise to $100,000 and there are 690 available right now.

Last month, 191 of those homes sold for $100,000 or less. That’s an implied absorption rate of 3.61 months, arguably a seller’s market.

So on the one hand an undifferentiated population of U.S. adults, who may or may not be in the market to buy a home, has a generally negative opinion of foreclosed homes.

And on the other hand there is a land-office business in foreclosed homes.

We will see many years’ worth of foreclosures in our market. How we feel about that in the abstract makes no difference.

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by Greg Swann

Sun City Real Estate Broker

Author website

Here are four great ways you can take in the holiday goodness of the F.Q. Story Historic District Home Tour this weekend:

1. Get thee hence. The tour is on Lynwood Street this year and runs Saturday evening and Sunday afternoon.
2. Tour our past F.Q. Story listings. We’ve listed a number of stunning historic homes in Story in the past. Here are a few of them:
   • 909 West Culver Street
   • 1134 West Culver Street
   • 1142 West Willetta Street
   • 1110 West Culver Street
   • 922 West Culver Street
   • 901 West Willetta Street
   • 1102 West Culver Street
3. Tour the F.Q. Story Historic District house-by-house. We love these homes. We have photos of hundreds of F.Q. Story homes. You can wander through the neighborhood from home, taking a peek at everything.
4. Join us at Open House. We don’t have a home listed in Story right now — our listings are selling in 43 days, on average, in 2008. But we have an amazing home for sale just a few blocks east, at 56 West Willetta Street. The home is a 1926 Craftsman, roomy and comfortable, with a heated pool and spa. Even better, you’re just a short walk from the new light rail line, which opens at the end of the month. If you’re coming down to Story for the tour, be sure to drop in and see us. We’ll be there from 11 am to 5 pm.

Technorati Tags: arizona, arizona real estate, phoenix, phoenix real estate

by Greg Swann

Sun City Real Estate Broker

Author website

This is my column for this week from the Arizona Republic (permanent link).

 
If you have cash or can qualify for a mortgage, this could be the ideal time to grab a bargain-priced home in the Phoenix area

The Phoenix area is hosting a wave of real estate investors like we haven’t seen since 2005. Unlike the novices who came here during the boom, these are experienced landlords. They’re here now because lender-owned homes are selling for bargain-basement prices.

They’re not alone. Savvy home-buyers are scooping up bargains, too, especially first-time homeowners. Interest rates are still attractive — even if the homes themselves are less appealing.

Interestingly, over the last couple of weeks, many of the lowest priced homes have seemed to evaporate. I’m guessing that October is going to be a banner month for closed transactions. Yes, most of these will be foreclosed homes, but buyers are performing the liquidator function, restoring the value of underperforming assets.

With so many homes selling, are we nearing a bottom in the Phoenix market? It’s plausible, if the number of sales meets or exceeds the number of newly-listed homes to be sold. But, even now, around 7,500 homes a month are entering the foreclosure process.

It could be a long time before that inventory is absorbed. And if it comes onto the market faster than buyers can snap it up, prices will continue to decline.

Visualize the real estate market as a pipeline. The home that gets a foreclosure notice today won’t hit the lender-owned market for three to six months. Are there enough investors and other buyers to snap up record numbers of homes, month-after-month, for the next two years — or longer?

The answer to that question is yes — if the price is right. If the demand for low-priced homes already exceeds the supply in the pipeline, prices will stabilize or even start to rise. If not, lenders will be forced to cut prices until buyers find them impossible to resist.

It’s an awful time if you have lost your home, and it’s not great if you are living in a home you cannot sell profitably. But if you have cash or can qualify for a mortgage, this is an ideal time to snag a bargain-priced home in Phoenix.

Technorati Tags: arizona, arizona real estate, investment, phoenix, phoenix real estate, real estate, real estate marketing

by Greg Swann

Sun City Real Estate Broker

Author website

This is my column for this week from the Arizona Republic (permanent link). There is a fuller review of this new technology here.

 
With its new iPhone application, Trulia.com is taking on-line real estate search to the streets

So who is winning the Realty.bot race, Trulia.com or Zillow.com? Your guess is as good as anyone’s, but this week marks a decisive change in the game: Trulia just released an iPhone application.

Trulia Mobile will offer a limited set of location-based searches from Apple’s iPhone, from an array of other smartphones and from Dash Navigation GPS devices. The user-experience will differ by device, but the design premise is based on location-sensitivity: Your iPhone always knows where you are, so it can interact with Trulia’s file servers to show you a list of nearby listings or open houses. You can get a detailed summary for each home on your list, and you can then email the listing to a friend, contact the listing agent directly or map the home so that you can hop over for a quick peek.

It’s hard to argue with the design premise: If people are going to go out house-hunting on their own, whether they are really looking for a house or simply touring open houses for decorating ideas, why not use the location-sensing power of modern electronics to hook them into Trulia’s listings database?

The ability to contact the listing agent plausibly increases the likelihood of dual agency transactions, but the fact of life is that many, many people are at least starting their home search without the advice of a buyer’s agent.

But here’s the bonus that popped out at me when I heard about Trulia’s iPhone application: Listing agents who want to compete for mobile-empowered buyers need to get their listings into Trulia and they need to keep their open house schedules up to date. I like anything that makes listers more diligent in their duties to their clients.

The iPhone application is slick and useful as written, this because “data is the new Intel-inside” and Trulia has a rich store of data to draw upon. The usual caveats about opt-in versus MLS listings apply, along with concerns about decay among voluntarily-maintained listings. But, all that notwithstanding: Trulia’s mobile-computing initiative is cool.

Technorati Tags: arizona, arizona real estate, disintermediation, phoenix, phoenix real estate, real estate, real estate marketing, technology

by Greg Swann

Sun City Real Estate Broker

Author website

This is my column for this week from the Arizona Republic (permanent link).

 
New FlexMLS system is a bold stride into the twenty-first century for Phoenix-area Multiple Listings Service

Metropolitan Phoenix got a brand new MLS system this week. MLS is the Multiple Listings Service, the system by which Realtors share their listings with one another. Until this week, the Arizona Regional Multiple Listings Service had been using a computing system called Tempo to share listings. As of this Monday just past, we have switched to the FlexMLS system.

Had you guessed that something had changed? If your Realtor has been sending you listings from a saved search, or if you had been receiving updates to a Tempo Gateway, all that stopped on Monday morning. Chances are your agent has spent much of this week rewriting searches and reestablishing gateways. The FlexMLS system is more robust than anything we’ve had before, but it’s also quite a bit more complicated. It may take a while before things get back to normal.

So why make the switch? For one very good reason, to tap into that much more robust technology. Tempo permitted a crude kind of map-based search, but FlexMLS allows you to select houses from within multiple non-contiguous irregular polygons. So, as an example, I can search for homes that are either within walking distance of Apollo High School or within walking distance of Valley Metro bus lines servicing Apollo High School.

There’s more: The FlexMLS pricing software is comparable to the tools appraisers use. Realtors will have to stretch themselves to learn how to tap this power, but our Comparative Market Analyses are going to be painstakingly accurate.

But not without some growing pains. ARMLS is by far the largest MLS system FlexMLS has taken on so far. This first week has been a trial for the North Dakota company — a strain on their servers, and, no doubt, a strain on their tech support staff as well.

And workaday Realtors are sharing the pain. No doubt many are grumbling, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” But FlexMLS is a bold stride into the twenty-first century for ARMLS. This transition may not be fun, but it will be a boon to everyone in the long run.

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by Greg Swann

Sun City Real Estate Broker

Author website

Phoenix is the best-named city in the wild and wooly West. We are the Thunderbird, rising always anew from our ashes, a constant state of reinvention. Surging ever outward — and lately even upward — we are too much the City of Tomorrow ever to spare a thought for the city we were yesterday.

And yet…

That city we were yesterday had its charms… Mostly we recall them through the good offices of PBS Channel 8. At fund-raising time, we get to catch a few brief glimpses of the Phoenix we paved over decades ago. A Phoenix where kids played in the street and swam in each other’s backyard pools. Where their older brothers and sisters cruised Central Avenue — ragtops down and the radios all tuned to the same station. Between the dusty little nineteenth-century town of Phoenix and the vast megalopolis that Phoenix has become, there was a shady oasis in the desert where prosperous people perfected the fine art of suburban living.

Here’s the good news: It’s still there. Everything changes in Phoenix, it seems like every day. But North Central Phoenix endures. In the late forties, through the fifties and early sixties, as Phoenix was surging outward in its first great growth spurts, some very wise people built big, sturdy homes right in the heart of everything. On both sides of Central, between the Canals, North Central Phoenix took root in the desert soil — and took root in the hearts of the people who built it.

Land that had been irrigated orange groves became rich irrigated lawns instead. And the trees that grew from that water spread a thick canopy of shade over the land. And houses made of concrete block were built one-by-one — modern and roomy, with high-ceilings and wide-open sight lines. And big back yards. And pools and barbecues and basketball hoops and volleyball nets.

And here’s the even better news: You can have a house just like that. There aren’t very many to be had, and North Central can be a pricey neighborhood. But the house we’re talking about, 1322 East Vermont Avenue, in the Madison United Neighborhood along the Missouri Avenue corridor, is everything you could wish for in a mid-century modern ranch home in North Central Phoenix — at a price you can afford.

My job is to sell houses — you didn’t know? — but we don’t sell homes we don’t love. We want to understand the houses we represent like works of art, each one unique and unrepeatable. The web site for this home features hundreds of photos, and we even went so far as to build a virtual coffee table book for this property, so that you can send it off to friends and family.

There’s so much more I could talk about, but that’s why we built such an elaborate web site for this home, so that you can see absolutely everything there is to know about it. We’ve always built an interactive floorplan into our web sites, but for 1322 East Vermont, for the first time, we’ve also built in a virtual remodeling feature. I happen to think that kitchen rocks the way it is, but if you’d like to try a different look, the virtual remodeling software makes it easy.

I could go on all day, but — let’s face it — a house either sells itself or it doesn’t. What we have is a spacious, well-kept mid-century modern ranch home on a big irrigated lot in the Missouri Avenue corridor of North Central Phoenix. You’re minutes from Downtown, seconds from the Biltmore. If you’re in love with an older Phoenix, or with that flaming Thunderbird that was always born just yesterday, this home is not for you. But if you long for that Phoenix of the fifties, that cool and comfortable suburban lifestyle perfected by our parents — give me a call. You don’t have to wait around for the fund-raisers on Channel 8. That shady oasis of a Phoenix still exists — and it can be yours…

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by Greg Swann

Sun City Real Estate Broker

Author website

We list more than our share of pricey homes, that’s a fact. I sometimes list all over the Valley for my investor clients, but Cathleen Collins has made a specialty — and an artform — out of listing remarkable homes: Historic, architecturally-distinctive and mid-century modern luxury homes. We’re often found in that half-million-and-up price range — and that’s a comfortable place for us to exercise the kind of marketing tools we like to deploy when we list a home for sale.

So what does it mean when we list a double-wide mobile-home in last rustic neighborhood in Glendale? The newspapers are full of starving Realtor stories. Are we so desperate for work that we’re listing for ten cents on our usual dollar?

Not quite. The listing itself is family — Cathleen’s sister’s husband’s mother. But we know we can do a better job on a home like this than the average mobile-home lister. There are things we would normally do that just don’t make sense for a home at this price. But building a web site for the home makes perfect sense to us.

The home is what it is, and we can’t puff it to be something else. The structure needs help, and our listing copy acknowledges this fact. But the land and the surrounding area are incomparable, some of the last bits of desert available this close to town. And these are the kinds of ideas we can bring out in the web site and on the home’s color flyers.

In some ways our listing this home is kind of funny. For example, the house is in rough-enough shape that we took no photos at all of the interior of the home, where normally we would take hundreds. But this house was a sweet lady’s dream home, and it is her financial nest egg even now. If we can help her get the most money she can for her home — that’s our job, a job we love to do regardless of the house we’re working with or its sales price.

But take careful note: The purpose of real estate marketing is to sell real estate. If you’re interested in picking up a quarter-acre of raw desert at a bargain price, take a look at the web site for 3527 West Quail Avenue in Glendale, AZ — and then give me a call. This property is primed for its next chapter, and you could be its author.

Technorati Tags: arizona, arizona real estate, investment, phoenix, phoenix real estate, real estate, real estate marketing

by Greg Swann

Sun City Real Estate Broker

Author website

This is my column for this week from the Arizona Republic (permanent link):

 
In the Metropolitan Phoenix real estate market, our long, slow slide in home prices is finally encountering demand

If you’ve been looking for the bottom of the Phoenix real estate market, it might well be upon us.

The world beyond our control — Washington and Wall Street — is so volatile right now that it’s hard for anyone to make plans.

The Federal Reserve Bank is determined to keep markets liquid, so its own interest rates are heading back toward record lows. The investment banks that brokered the mortgage-backed securities that made sub-prime loans possible are in turmoil. Meanwhile, Congress is desperate to do something — which will almost certainly make things worse.

The interesting thing about all that chaos is that it seems to be isolated to the real estate market. The larger economy is growing so fast that the twitterpated monetary policies of the Fed seem not to have had much of an impact.

That’s a good thing, and let’s hope things stay that way.

Meanwhile, in the world we have some control over — the local real estate market in Metropolitan Phoenix — our long, slow slide in prices is finally encountering demand.

Because so many people wanted to buy houses in Phoenix, our builders gleefully over-built the Valley. This caused the glut of inventory we have been trying to absorb over the past nine quarters.

Many of the resale homes that have languished on the market are by now short sales or have been taken back by the bank. Lenders don’t want to own houses, so they’re cutting prices until the homes get sold.

At the same time, our reliable inflow of population, along with investors and second-home buyers, is there to absorb these newly-affordable homes. The snow belt just got belted with its worst winter in memory, which will bring even more newcomers to Phoenix.

It could be we’ll be back to normal inventory levels fairly soon. The bad news? If your home is for sale, the price it will sell for right now is probably quite a bit lower than you think it should be. If you don’t have to move now, you might be better off staying put for a year or two.

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